In March of 2021, the Unidata Program Center made the community aware that it no longer had software development resources available to support the continued use and evolution of GEMPAK. Following discussions with community members, Unidata published A Proposal for Community Support of GEMPAK, laying out some history of the package and the support situation, and proposing a way forward. This post describes the current situation and includes information about the most current community supported release.
The Unidata program has been providing the geoscience community with access to and technical support for the GEMPAK software package for nearly thirty years. This post describes the current circumstances surrounding Unidata's support for GEMPAK, and suggests some possible future actions to ensure continued community access to this resource.
For more than 30 years, meteorology students, researchers, and operational practitioners have used the GEMPAK (GEneral Meteorology PAcKage) software package for data analysis and visualization of a diverse set of atmospheric science datasets. Initially developed in the late 1980s to produce forecast and analysis graphics for the National Weather Service's National Centers for Environmental Prediction, GEMPAK has been superseded by more modern software in operational settings, and has not been actively developed by the Weather Service since 2008. Within the education and research community, however, GEMPAK's potent combination of powerful analysis and visualization tools, ease of use, and low cost (it's free) has led to its continued use, despite its age.
Unidata's MetPy project aims to help the academic community modernize its software toolset by bringing the best features of GEMPAK into the burgeoning world of scientific Python.
GOES16 and GOES17 ABI products are distributed in NetCDF4 formatted files, and GEMPAK as of release 7.5.1 can now read and display these products in their native formats (it is no longer needed to convert netCDF to McIDAS area format to display in GEMPAK).
GEMPAK 7.3.1 is available as source code, 64-bit Linux binaries, and an OS X binary tarball. The most significant updates in this release are to GEMPAK's Python scripts which retrieve data from an AWIPS EDEX server.
7.3.1 binary and source code releases are available at
